Steam to Re-Launch Next Week

Valve officials have announced that the company’s games-on-demand service Steam will be made officially available for the first time on Wednesday morning next week, via www.steampowered.com. Steam already has 300,000 registers users – who have been downloading free copies of Half-Life and other products during the public beta test – and the company’s Erik Johnson has stated that, “The next major release of Steam will be the first step towards converting the entire Half-Life user base to Steam”. Johnson also stated that in the future “you’ll have to have Steam installed to play the most current version of Half-Life”. The real test of the system will be the release of Half-Life 2 later this year, which the company will be offering for download as a standalone product and via a monthly subscription of $9.99, along with other “free” content.